


Aversion

by telm_393



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, Claustrophobia, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-06 13:54:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16833949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: Jason's already been in the machine once.This time feels different for some reason, though he can't put his finger on why...





	Aversion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sandrilene](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandrilene/gifts).



Jason’s still not sure how to get to school. It’s a long time since he’s been to any kind of school at all, and not very long since he’s been in Australia, so he thinks it makes sense that it’s confusing.

He does end up at school eventually, once he remembers that Uber exists and can take him, and then he finds his way to the classroom all by himself. He’s not sure how, but it doesn’t matter. Sometimes things just happen, and he goes with them. Less now, but there are still some things that don’t need to be questions.

The problem is that when he reaches the classroom, no one’s there, which makes him worry a little. A lot. He wonders if everyone left or what, if he’s alone now in this weird place and in this weird classroom. There’s probably an explanation for this, he tells himself. Definitely an explanation.

Jason’s never found a reason not to trust his new friends, so it doesn’t make sense that they’d leave him now. There’s probably something different than usual going on. He closes his eyes tight and tries to remember what’s different today, takes deep breaths like Mrs. Cheung next door when he was growing up did when she taught him how to meditate.

“Empty your mind,” she said. “It shouldn’t be hard for you.”

It always was, actually, even this time that Jason’s just trying to empty his mind of all the stuff he’s thinking except the explanation for why no one’s here.

Chidi said something about it. Something that started with “remember”. Jason hates sentences that start with “remember”. He was tired when he heard it too, which doesn’t help. Ethics is a lot of work, and time here is in a weird warp place. Like that song “Time Warp”, or warp speed on Star Trek. Probably. Jason doesn’t really get Star Trek, especially since he only ever watched it in Spanish with his neighbor Mrs. Rodriguez, and he doesn’t really, like...speak Spanish.

“Hey, J-Dawg!” he hears before he can find what he was looking for in his head. Jason recognizes her voice—he’s good at recognizing voices and people—and opens his eyes to look at Eleanor, who’s leaning on the other side of the table from him. She raises her eyebrows. “Whatcha doing, bud?”

Eleanor’s nice. She always says she’s not nice, but she is. At least she is to him.

“Trying to remember what Chidi wanted me to remember last time I was here,” Jason admits.

Eleanor snorts. “Yeah, makes sense. He wanted you to remember we don’t have class today.”

Jason feels way disappointed, kind of like he used to when his teachers would tell him it wasn’t a teaching day, because they had to go moonlight. Jason still doesn’t really know what moonlighting is. Probably coke. Jason doesn’t really like school, but he likes this school and he likes learning things even when he doesn’t really get them. “I came here for nothing?”

“No,” Eleanor says quickly. “I mean there’s no class today ‘cause we’re going to the MRI lab. To do MRIs. It’ll be fun.”

Jason’s so tired he almost asks what the fuck an MRI is before his stomach sinks and he remembers. The MRI is the thing without the radiation (Jason’s question is what the ‘R’ is supposed to stand for if it’s not ‘radiation’) and with the pictures and the clunking sounds. He didn’t like going in the first time after they checked him out at the nurse’s office—which is super fancy, like a whole building—to make sure he wouldn’t die from the spider bites or something. The way it was all closed up and silver reminded him of something, though he can’t put his finger on what. “Ohhh,” he says instead of anything else. “Okay.”

“Hey, it means we get a break from that weird Plato book we’re reading right now,” Eleanor says. “Get up, let’s get this over with.”

It’s a good idea, so Jason gets up and walks with her over to the big building where Simone (who just wants to be called Simone because apparently she’s not actually being a teacher right now) works, and looks at everyone as he walks past them and they walk past him. Jason likes people watching, he used to do it with Donkey Doug all the time, and he’s in a totally different place in, like, the world now, which means there’s a lot of new people to watch.

They’re mostly white like Eleanor, and the guys are dressed in shirts with buttons. Jason sucks at doing up buttons. He’s just in shorts and a t-shirt, and for the first time he feels weird about it.

“Hey, Eleanor,” Jason says as he follows her into the machine room building, “if there’s no radiation in the MRI, what does the ‘R’ stand for?”

Eleanor frowns a little, and then a lot. “Uh...radio...whatever, it doesn’t matter.”

She sounds snappy, so Jason doesn’t ask again. 

Tahani and Chidi are already in the MRI room, and Simone’s behind the glass thing that’s kind of like one of those mirrors at police stations, except you can see the person on the other side. Jason waves at her, and she waves back.

Tahani smiles at him, and Chidi says, “There he is! You ready?”

Jason’s not actually sure if he’s ready, or how he’s supposed to be ready. He shrugs.

“You have anything metal on you, mate?” Simone asks over the little mic she has, and Jason thinks about it and then shakes his head.

“You sure?”

Jason rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Just double checking.”

Jason bets she didn’t double check for anyone else, but he shrugs it off. The world feels a little swirly, and he goes over to the side of the room and sits down on the floor. “I’ll go last,” he announces. No one argues.

He watches as Chidi, Tahani, and Eleanor go through the MRI. Or he sort of watches, because he also goes to sleep a little, maybe. He’s tired, and he didn’t sleep that well last night, with the sounds of an unfamiliar city outside.

Jason wishes he had some Adderall or something, but he doesn’t and neither does Eleanor, so he’s gonna have to just...deal, or whatever. Plus Simone and Chidi both asked him to stay away from drugs, because they could mess up the experiment, especially whip-its. He hadn’t been using whip-its all that much anyway, even in the year before Australia and before he almost died. They don’t make him feel that good anymore.

“It’s called an aversion,” Simone said when he told her that. “You had a bad experience with whip-its, so you’re not keen to have it again.”

It makes sense, but Jason tells himself that last time the MRI was just weird, not really aversion-y. It was freaky, but he was also kinda distracted by the spider and then from the medicine he got for the spider bites even though he didn’t need it, and it didn’t last that long, so it wasn’t actually that bad. It _is_ gonna be longer today, though, if his turn is like everyone else’s, because now there’s more ethics questions from class, like a test. Jason hates tests. He also hated the way they showed him pictures of almost dying, and the idea of that and also a test makes him a weird kind of sad, but he just reminds himself again that it wasn’t too bad.

Not last time, and not today. Jason’s not scared. He’s not scared of anything. Usually when he’s for real not scared of anything he’s, like, wasted, but it doesn’t matter. From what he can see, no one else has a problem with the machine, so neither does he. He still dozes most of the time that the others are in it, though, so he won’t have to think about it and because he’s really, really tired. 

Eleanor’s second to last, so when she finally gets out it’s Jason’s turn, which is fine. Everyone else could breathe. He breathed fine last time. He goes into the machine room without hesitating and slides right into the machine. It’s not a box shape, which is important. It really is more like a tanning bed. At first when Jason was told it was a scan, he thought it’d be like the supermarket—like they’d just pass a red light over his forehead, it’d go ‘beep’, and then it’d all be done. Jason really wishes it was like that.

Jason’s figured out what this also reminds him of, though, besides the tanning bed. It’s like one of those drawers at the morgue where they slide in the dead people.

There’s a little screen where they’re going to show him pictures like last time. They caught him off guard then, but this time they won’t. He knows what’s coming. He didn’t know what was coming when he locked himself in the safe, or the first time he went into the MRI. His mind jumps, and he starts to think it’s kinda dumb to do the same thing that hurt you twice. He has, though, he reminds himself. He went inside a safe for the dance routine, except it was made out of cardboard, so that’s different. It wasn’t gonna hurt him, he understood it. This thing is made of metal, he thinks.

Someone talks, and it startles him out of his thoughts. “What?”

“Are you ready, Jason?” Simone asks over her little mic, and Jason nods.

“No, no, remember what I told you, don’t move except to talk, yeah?”

Jason almost nods again, but then he remembers not to, so he doesn’t. 

“Can you hear me, mate?”

“Uh, right, yeah,” Jason says. He’s starting to think that knowing what’s coming doesn’t make any of this better. It might make it worse. “I can hear you. I won’t move.”

He’s starting to feel sick. This is probably like it’d be if he locked himself in a real safe again, except he can breathe. Maybe.

Simone says something over the mic, and Jason isn’t sure if he catches it, but it’s a question and he answers like he’s on autopilot, trying to sink down into a place that doesn’t want to kick something or throw up or scream. He pretends he’s just lying in a bed. Meditating. It kind of works. He closes his eyes and tells himself it’s all a dream, which makes sense. He has dreams about being locked up somewhere all the time now. The other day he had a dream where he was in the MRI again and it got smaller and smaller until—huh.

Maybe that’s why it’s weird this time. It’s just a dream. The idea makes him feel better, and he’s able to answer the other questions Chidi and Simone ask without thinking about where he is, right until Simone says something about the slides, and Jason almost, almost tells her “no”, or “wait”, or “fuck no”, but then it’s too late to say anything, and a safe, a snorkel, and a bunch of empty whip-it canisters flash in front of him.

Well, they don’t really flash. That’s, like, inaccurate. They all stay there above him for longer than a flash, and also longer than a Vine. More like...twenty Vines? Maybe more. How long is twenty Vines? Maybe Chidi knows, he knows everything. It’s probably one of those things Jason can get stuck on for days but isn’t that important. What’s important is that the pictures are there, and after they’re gone Jason feels even sicker. He’s not dreaming, but he feels worse than last time, so maybe this is the time his luck will run out. There’s lots of reasons he feels worse than last time, he tells himself, but he can’t actually think of any, even though he knows they’re there and he probably thought of them and had them in his brain before he started thinking about Vines, but knowing he knew something he doesn’t know now isn’t very helpful.

Chidi asks him a question, and Jason stumbles through an answer, making sure to stay very still even though he really wants to move, because maybe the reason he has to stay so still is to use up less air. He wishes he hadn’t tried to rob the restaurant. That was dumb, and now he’s getting eaten by a scanning machine. His chest is getting tight, even while he talks. Yeah, he feels bad about who he was, and all the bad stuff he’s done and how it’s fucked things up for him and other people. Yeah, he wants things to be different. That’s why he’s here. Jason isn’t an angry person, but he really wants to start yelling.

His eyes are starting to water, and right when he really thinks he’s running out of oxygen Chidi stops in the middle of a question and asks, “Jason? Are you feeling okay?”

“Yeah, fine,” Jason says automatically, but then he says, “I think the machine’s broken.”

“Sorry?”

“I think the machine’s broken!” Jason says again, but louder.

“Why do you think that?” Simone asks. She must’ve taken over for Chidi.

“I can’t breathe right,” Jason says. “It’s getting really hard. I think I made a mistake. I think I’m suffocating.”

He doesn’t know how to get out. Maybe he can slither out like a snake, into the fresh air? But what if the machine explodes or closes up or something when he moves?

“That’s not possible,” Simone’s saying. “There’s space for oxygen to get in above you and below you.”

“Let me out,” Jason says, because he does not care even a little. He knows what he’s feeling, and he can’t breathe. “I wanna get out!”

“Okay, okay,” Simone says. “No problem. You just have to stay still for a bit.”

“Why can’t you let me out _now?”_

“You just need to give me a couple of minutes to get everything sorted.”

Jason stays still, and Simone goes quiet. It’s loud in the machine. That’s one thing that’s different from the safe, which was really, really quiet. No one could hear him there. “Can you guys hear me?” he asks.

“...Yes, of course we can,” Chidi says. “That’s how you can hear us.”

“Okay. Okay. I’m freaking out,” he says, just like he did in the safe, but this time someone actually says something back. Eleanor this time. Eleanor seems like the kind of person who’d know how to get out of a safe. 

“Yeah, no kidding—okay, okay, I know that doesn’t help, shut up—but, uh, don’t worry, bud, nothing’s gonna happen. We won’t let anything happen to you.”

“I can’t breathe,” Jason tells her, because it’s a big problem for him right now.

“J, I’m not a never say can’t kinda person, but you can definitely breathe. That’s how you’re talking. It’s science. Just listen to me. You’ll be out of there in a sec. It’s no big deal. You’ll get out and we’ll, uh...” Eleanor’s voice fades out like she’s covered the mic up or turned her face away from it, but then she’s back and she says, “...we’ll go out and get a drink or something. Not at the weird American place or that other one with the spider theme, like, at an actual bar.”

That’s nice. Jason likes being with his friends. “Okay.”

“Just lie still, the...thing should be sliding out now. You’re fine.”

Jason keeps lying very, very still, and the thing he’s lying on, the morgue drawer thing, slides out. He sits up, breathing hard, and he wrings his hands and then twists them together. They feel numb. His heart is beating really, really fast, and it’s hard to see because the world is so wavy, and his chest is still tight. The door from the other room opens and the others come in. Someone puts their hand on his shoulder and it must be Tahani because it’s her voice that says, “Breathe, Jason, you’re all right. Just...slowly take a deep breath.”

Jason’s outside of the machine now, that’s a fact. Ergo, he should have enough air. There’s enough air. He takes a deep breath like Tahani said, and then another one to double check, and then another one just because he’s relieved, and then he’s breathing like normal. “What happened?” he asks.

“Looks like you had a pretty strong fear response to being in an enclosed space, probably related to your near death experience,” Chidi says in a shaky voice. Jason wants to pat him on the shoulder and tell him everything’s chill but also ask him what he’s even talking about.

Eleanor makes it so that he doesn’t need to ask. “You freaked because you felt like you were back in the safe.”

“Oh,” Jason says. That makes more sense, even though he feels kinda dumb about it. “Okay. But nothing happened.”

“Nothing happened,” Eleanor agrees. “You didn’t even mess up the scans by moving.”

Jason brightens a little. “I still did it right!”

“Yeah you did! Good job, man,” Eleanor says, holding her hand out for a high five.

He gives her a high five because that’s just, like. How it works.

“We’ll figure something out for next time you’re in the MRI,” Chidi starts, and Jason feels himself wilt a little.

“But we don’t have to think about that right now, because we’re not the nerds here,” Eleanor cuts in. “Let’s get something to eat instead. Tahani’s treat.”

“Excuse me?” Tahani says, but then she pauses. “Actually, yes, it will be my treat. I would’ve offered to buy if you hadn’t offered for me. Just so you know.”

“Obviously,” Eleanor says. “Anyway, what do you say we put this all behind us?”

It sounds like a good plan, and Jason leaves the room and the machine as fast as he can. He’ll worry about it later. Right now he just wants to go out and be with his friends.

“I’m happy you guys were with me,” he announces later. He’s a little buzzed, but not drunk. “During the, like...machine thing. You helped.”

Eleanor shrugs. “It was whatever, man.”

“I certainly won’t judge you, I’ve panicked over less,” Chidi chimes in.

“It was nothing,” Tahani says, waving her hand a little.

They all talk at the same time, but Jason hears each one of them, and he smiles. He’s not scared anymore, for now, and that’s a relief.

Tahani calls him an Uber and gives him a scented piece of paper with his apartment number written on it, so he has “no excuse to sleep in a dumpster this time, thank you”, and Jason feels pretty good when he gets home. He’s still tired enough that he curls up to sleep before anything else, but he turns on the TV first, just so he won’t be alone.

Jason’s apartment doesn’t have that many channels on the TV, but it has enough for him to flip through a bunch of boring stuff like the news and _Game of Thrones_ until he sees something that’s not familiar but isn’t exactly completely not familiar either. His finger stutters over the remote and he sees a bunch of people on the screen, and they’re all in squares like the one on the shirt that guy Trevor made, which Jason doesn't have anymore because he used it to clean up wine Tahani spilled one time.

 _The Brady Bunch._ Jason’s never watched this show, but the colors and the way the name’s so close to the one he and his friends have make him drop the remote.

The show isn’t interesting, and he can’t tell any of the characters apart, but it’s enough for now, and he falls asleep to the sound of canned laughter.


End file.
